


Slither

by girl_wonder



Category: Angel: the Series, Supernatural
Genre: Crossover, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2006-02-05
Updated: 2006-02-05
Packaged: 2017-10-13 08:41:57
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,101
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/135346
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/girl_wonder/pseuds/girl_wonder
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He tried not to spend a lot of time in memory lane, but there really wasn't much to do with only roads and the occasional pit stop.  Lindsey and Dean on the road.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Slither

_**SPN/A:tS: Art and Fic: Slither**_  
This was written and designed for [](http://ethrosdemon.livejournal.com/profile)[**ethrosdemon**](http://ethrosdemon.livejournal.com/)'s birthday. Kass, we love you, chica. Have a most wonderful of wonderful birthdays. [](http://dopplegl.livejournal.com/profile)[**dopplegl**](http://dopplegl.livejournal.com/) and I collaborated on it. All of the gorgeous art is his, the writing is mine.

I'd like to thank [](http://dopplegl.livejournal.com/profile)[**dopplegl**](http://dopplegl.livejournal.com/) and [](http://stone-princess.livejournal.com/profile)[**stone_princess**](http://stone-princess.livejournal.com/) for being so amazing and patient when I was doing my usual flip outs. I do a chest pound of love for both of you.

Title: Slither  
Author: fryadvocate  
Artist: Caleb (dopplegl)

Disclaimer: Don't own. Don't sue.

Summary: He tried not to spend a lot of time in memory lane, but there really wasn't much to do with only roads and the occasional pit stop. Lindsey and Dean on the road.

  


  


The state of Texas reminded Dean of this one time when he was younger and he woke up with a rattlesnake a foot from his head. Someone had shot it, Dad or Sam, Dean didn't really care who, because the important part was the blood spattered on his lips had tasted like real blood, the body was flexible like those girls who danced in bars at the border, and it had been looking at him.

He tried not to spend a lot of time in memory lane, but there really wasn't much to do with only roads and the occasional pit stop.

After driving the mountains from Washington to California, he wasn't sure how he'd managed to forget how soothing flat states were. He could just drive, push his girl until she coasted and flew and sped with the grace of something built to run smooth stretches of desert with hot asphalt under her tires.

He was following a route to Oklahoma, panhandle shaped tornado country. He didn't care where he was going as long as when he got there the thing he was hunting was still around. Licking his lips, he tongued the shallow split caused by dry air, too much sun.

The sun was hovering over the horizon, but he didn't need to turn on the headlights yet, there was still sunlight to burn and road to cover.

*****

The town said: Don't bother, you won't find what you're looking for here.

"Fuck you, too," Lindsey said back.

Lindsey didn't smoke when he was at Wolfram and Hart, but with a broken down pickup truck, no busses and a bar that only served beer and whiskey, he felt he was allowed to play Russian roulette with his lungs instead of waiting for the emptiness to kill him.

He'd always been proactive.

The bartender didn't seem to care if he smoked inside and Lindsey briefly thought about how funny it was that in California people got rich so they could do things like smoke in bars and then they got richer than that and started thinking that smoking inside was gauche.

He ordered another whiskey.

The whiskey said: Hi, old friend.

In the interim time, Lindsey had forgotten how markedly boring everything in between New York and LA was.

Pool balls slapped each other in his background and his evil hand twitched. He could win at that. Instead he swallowed the whiskey, ordered a beer, knew it was stupid to be mixing beer and whiskey, drank it anyway.

*****

Dean hated mid-western towns that had needed a sign to indicate they were home to anything more than people and oil companies. This one was home of the mud pie. The last one had been home of the blue bell.

When he pulled up to the gas station, he knew he was in the right place, even if the city's sign hadn't already told him that. It was the quietness, the feeling low in his stomach that he was near something evil. It wasn't a premonition so much as experience.

Inside the gas station's florescent market, aisles lined with munching food that he usually loaded up on but rarely paid for, the attendant didn't even look up from her magazine. One of her hands was under the counter and Dean wondered what it was that always made people want to shoot him.

She called out, "That'll be $40.58."

Dropping his soda on the counter, Dean smiled pleasantly, "Hey, how you doin'?" It was easy to let his accent through when he was around familiar loose vowels, missing consonants.

Smiling back, she took the credit card and used both hands to ring him up, said, "Oklahoma?"

"Kansas," Dean corrected and she smiled wider, not needing to say that she had family in Kansas. He learned forward, asked casually, "Are there any fields around here?"

She raised an eyebrow and drummed her long, lacquered nails on the counter. "Sweetie," on the ends of her nails were little fake gems that sparkled when she gestured. "This whole town's fields."

"How about any bars?" Dean kept smiling even when she stopped.

"Two miles down that way, you can't miss it. El Cacto Fuerte."

*****

  


Stacking four bar coasters on top of each other, Lindsey used them to launch a rolled up napkin over the bottles and onto the floor. The bartender ignored him, watching football on television, but flipped him the bird when Lindsey tipped his beer over on the counter.

Since college, since Holland had personally put a hand on his shoulder and said, "You have a future with us," Lindsey had only been truly drunk four, maybe five times. When you had Lilah over your shoulder, in your face, when you had a lunch meeting with someone who killed people professionally, it was too dangerous. When you were alone, when you had the need to get too drunk to see straight, it was more dangerous.

His father had never raised a hand to any of his children, but Lindsey had seen what drink did to Jack McDonald, seen his mother working longer hours at the diner, seen the blisters on her feet, the red raised burns of hot oil spatter on her arms. Jack had worked on the farm less as the need for work grew more, and the money, the money that the hospital wanted to take care of his sick baby sisters, had already been pissed out in Jack Daniels and Jose Cuervo.

Outside it was nearly dark and someone was pulling into the lot, a black low, rumbling car and for ten seconds Lindsey thought, said, "Angel."

*****

The guy, with a sort of _off_ country hick look, stared at him, then his car. Said nothing, but went back to his beer with one long up and down look that would have meant something else in a city, but here it probably just meant, "I could take you." Dean thought he couldn't, but he also knew _off_ and he knew that anything _off_ probably meant evil.

Moreover, there was that black slit-eyed look about the guy, the barely contained one, rattler curled in on itself, aware of Dean, aware of the heat of his blood, not aware of the shotgun pointed at it. A lot of really evil things had that slice of black in them, sure black, pitch black, soulless black. Eyes were the window to the soul and the Winchesters just happened to take that a little more seriously than everyone else.

Dean sat down on a barstool, near the bartender. It was a bar. Like any bar. Like every bar. He saw enough to know everything there was about it.

"Nice lookin' dog," he said to the bartender. Behind the cash register, the picture of the Doberman snarled at Dean, viscous through the color print.

The bartender didn't look at him, instead, uncapped a beer bottle and slid it over to Dean without looking away from the football game on tv. From what Dean could tell, it was a local high school game, their colors were like any school. Like every school.

Dean took a long swallow, waited until the commercial to ask casually about the dying fields. Bartender grunted, looked at him suspiciously, even when he explained he was trying to find work.

The guy two stools over, the one who was trying to win the world record for most violently thrown out of a bar with the use of paper napkins, kept looking at him out of the side of his eye, like he was studying him, like he saw through the bullshit. Dean was used to getting that look from city people, from farmers who had already lost everything who wanted to know what more the government (he was FBI, F&G, Wildlife, INS, once CIA) could take from them.

He glared back and the two kids playing pool started yelling, so Dean looked over, following the guy's gaze and nodded.

*****

Pool was easy, like researching something he knew the answer to. Pool was leaning down and cocking his hips in a way that meant one thing in the city with pretty eyes on him and pretty figures bumping against him and an accent that was hidden under the persona of Lindsey. Not that it had been much of a persona after a while, just the way that things were, the way he was.

Under his fingers, the pool table felt was smooth from age, balls slid slick across it when he centered them. He slid them into a rack and said, "You want to break?"

The guy was a pretty face, a pretty figure, smiled in all the right places like a country boy should. When he leaned over, then glanced at Lindsey across the table, though, his eyes had something more, it was less than city, but so much more than country. The kid looked at him, and grinned.

The pool balls broke, scattering in an instant like an explosion and Lindsey snapped back to the present. Competition.

*****

The guy was good. Drunk, but good. Dean let him get the advantage, let him have the cue ball watched the way that he played, the leaning, the squint, the attention he gave to each shot.

Sober, he'd probably be someone to tangle with, calculate out the game before they even started. His eyes were sharp, flickering. He kept glancing at Dean, hard looks that were sizing him up, and Dean smiled back, friendly and harmless.

He threw a small hip cock into his stance in case that was what the guy was trying to say instead of, "I want to beat the living crap out of you." Dean was used to both.

The bartender swore, a long string of explicatives that made Dean look over appreciatively, made the guy pause before he shot again, still missing the pocket.

Dean took over, pretending to work to sink two balls. He got the third, missed the fourth. Watched the guy play some more, watched him win. Neither seemed to make him particularly happy.

Next round, Dean laughed, pretended that he was having fun; he wasn't yet. Still grinning, Dean said, "Want to make this interesting?" He put as much hick as he could into it, scratched the fresh stubble, leaned against the table and stacked one cowboy boot on top of the other.

The guy raised an eyebrow back, amused by something more than the two twenties that Dean pulled out of his wallet. When the guy pulled out five, Dean looked down, pretended to think about it, pretended to be a little embarrassed he had to think about it. The trick was to not meet they guy's eyes until the end, so the guy thought you weren't sure of your skill or you didn't have the money.

Dean didn't wonder about where the guy was from, why he had probably over three hundred in his wallet, except that he did wonder, under the surface. He would be stupid not to. Running a thumb in a small circle on the cue, Dean looked up, expected to see triumph.

Casual pose, and if he'd had a hat, he'd probably have it cocked, but the guy's eyes were dark, watching. Thumbing his nose, he glanced down at the money on the table, said, "Are we playing or not?"

 _Off_ so often meant evil, so often meant that Dean'd pay for letting his guard down with blood, his or theirs, but Dean didn't think like that a whole lot, expected Sam to do it for him. Instead, Dean pulled the money out of his wallet and put it down on the table, careful like he wasn't sure what he'd do if he lost.

*****

The kid was good. Lindsey held his beer bottle to his mouth, took a long, long, swallow. The difference between the kid and everyone else in the hick town was his car, the way that the boots looked like they'd been pulled out for today and hadn't been worn quite enough to be comfortable. Even faked, the nervousness was attractive, when he was used to poaching with sharks, sleeping with sharp teeth and claws.

Don't think about real claws, real teeth, don't think about blonde hair, or the same dangerous look on mother/childe/grandchilde.

"Got a name?" Lindsey asked, lining up the break. In front of him, the balls wavered drunkenly for a minute and he blinked to clear his eyes, took the shot in one clean motion, like stabbing someone from a far away angle.

The balls angled off each other, slowly rolled to a stop and said: Bad luck, buddy.

Nothing had been pocketed.

Squinting, eyes already on the balls lined up neatly for him, the kid looked back at Lindsey and said, "Dean." He was trying to be earnest, but the slickness was something that Lindsey recognized in himself.

"Lindsey." He smiled, shark, post-insurance-won't-pay-a-dime, post-law-school smile.

Dean blinked, like he was seeing things, nodded an acknowledgement and took the table. He moved efficiently and Lindsey had seen professional killers move with less grace, less self assurance.

The balls said: He knows what he's doing, and look at those hips.

Glancing around the table, Dean finished off the game, eight ball corner pocket. Scooped up Lindsey's money and put it into his pocket fast.

The cash said: You got played.

Lindsey said, "What do you know about cars?" because Angel was an exception, boys who drive long, low, high maintenance cars know how to take care of them.

*****

The guy had a broken truck, shotgun under a blanket in the back seat and a pile of CDs on the passenger side. Soda cans and balled up fast food trash were the familiar debris of long distance travel.

The same cool calm from the bar, the alcohol loosened hips made him trace the line of Lindsey's ass up, to where the worn cotton shirt touched lightly strong back muscles. When he unlocked the truck, leaned over and popped the hood, Dean followed the motion with his eyes, interaction of denim and white cotton, hinting at the motion of muscle and fine, tanned skin.

Dean unlatched and pulled up the hood, looking for something obvious. When he saw the problem, he said, "Well, this might take me a while to fix," earnestly like he'd been taught to talk to city men who wanted him to work for free. It wouldn't take him a while, it would take a toolbox and the right sized lug nut.

Holding out cash, Lindsey said, "I'm sure you can work it out."

Cash, cash and a knowing look, and the rule was: never con a con, but he wasn't scamming exactly. He was playing the situation to his advantage and the guy had _asked._ Of course, if Dean was stuck here, in this hick town, he would ask a con for help, too. Just to get out from under the press of country and imminent poverty.

"Sure," Dean said. "Let me get my tools."

*****

Lindsey drove until he hit the state line, drove some more, stopped when he was far enough away from Texas, from the sound of his daddy's accent in every man's mouth. He drove until he hit Louisiana accent, richer vowel sounds, lower, until he reached people who took their time talking, who smiled when he played his guitar and nodded without stamping their boots hard on the floor in rhythm.

In Louisiana he found bars that let him drink for free if he leaned in and sang bluegrass. The closer to the sea he got, the more he found wide hipped women who looked at him with knowing eyes before he even opened his mouth.

People gave directions by churches here, and it was soothing, a little familiar that everyone knew the name of preachers and voodoo magic was treated more like the side effect of having so much religion.

He kept on the 90, south and east, curving miles from the ocean, miles from home, towards rivers and counties with the names of saints and French words butchered to American sounds.

The car rumbled and he listened to country and bluegrass, throwing in some gospel and blues for variety. He passed signs that read, "Alligator Farm" he passed roads named after people, "Jane's Road." On a Tuesday, during breakfast, he'd pulled up his sleeves, and the cook had come from behind the counter, weighty, resolute steps, accent so thick he looked to his waitress to translate.

"She said, you ain't right with nature," his waitress said, her own eyes drawn to the pale scar he thought no one noticed any more.

The cook wrapped her large hand around his wrist tight, fingers lined up exactly where it had been taken off, put together wrong. She said, "Not right, 'all. Got 'sum dem gafa."

Trying to shake her off, he looked to his waitress, thin girl, tall and with high cheekbones, she wore faded jeans that in New York would have been designed to look like that, a tight shirt that showed a flat chest, prominent collarbones. She was looking at him scared, the way that he used to get witnesses for the opposition to look on the stand.

"She says, you aren't right. She says you got the devil in you." The cook released his wrist, took away his plate, leaving a ring of condensation where it had been.

Lindsey threw back his head, laughed. Said, "Yeah, I know that." And he did.

******

The thing was dead. Killed, it looked just like almost everything did: empty, blood and bone missing the key ingredient of animation to make it real. Even asleep, there was the spark of movement that set living things apart from the dead.

Dean crouched anyway, held a mirror to the thing's mouth, waited until he didn't see any breath. It would need to be burned, need to be buried. Digging the grave took more time than Dean wanted it to, but he didn't have a choice, and ended up sleeping, filthy with dirt, in the backseat of the Impala.

At the next truck stop, he pulled over, grabbed a washrag from his bag and scrubbed off most of it. The bathroom had no lights, and the water was freezing, smelled too much like copper and metal, but he still took a handful to his mouth, drank it down, smoothed some over his face two handed. He ground the heels of his palms into his eye sockets, pushed hard until he saw colors. The scent of stale piss and waste, vomit and sweat faded for a moment, and he wavered on his feet, catching himself with both hands on the edge of the stained concrete sink.

A trucker came in, through the scratched reflective metal, Dean saw the flesh colored shape move to a urinal. Dean walked out before the scent of fresh piss could hit him.

In the Impala he pulled out a map and his cell phone, no new messages from Dad, but there was still that ghost in Mississippi. Tracing the lines of road, Dean followed the 10, saw it slope down into New Orleans, then up into Mississippi, Dean could do it, he knew.

The Impala started, eager to move, and he put in some Slayer because he hadn't had coffee yet, and the huge bag of M&Ms he'd picked up at the last gas station wasn't the same as a meal of pancakes, bacon and eggs.

*****

  


Before Mississippi, before New Orleans, Lindsey found a bar he could sing at regularly, they paid him to reel in tourists who came to town for tours of the bayou swampland. There were heads of alligators on the walls, a long 9 foot stuffed one hung behind him when he sang into the mike.

He kept the music family themed, dogs and pickups, lighter pieces where he didn't sing at all, just let his fingers run. Even his evil hand remembered what that freedom felt like.

One of the waitresses, the small blonde married girl from Talahassee, kept touching his arm between sets, bringing him water, mouthing along to the old songs she knew. They were floating towards something he wasn't even sure he could have anymore. The day that Dean walked into the bar, Lindsey was wiping a bit of red sauce off of her cheek with a damp napkin, and he looked up because the door was opening and there was Dean, back lit, but just as attractive as last time Lindsey had seen him.

Dean saw him right away, the edge of his mouth twitched up, revealing small wrinkles in the corners of his eyes, fine things that were only visible because in the light, his face absorbed shadow, accenting the cheekbones, the nose, the stubble. When he stepped out of the doorway, into the bar, towards Lindsey, there was purpose in his stride, different from the country boy amble he'd had in Texas.

Tilting his head, he said, "Don't suppose you're up for another game of pool?" The country Kansas accent had shifted to more local Louisiana.

Lindsey didn't need to wonder if the kid was doing it on purpose, blending in with his surroundings. The adaptable look was back in his eyes, the one that he used while playing pool.

*****

  


After years at the game, Dean had learned that there was no such thing as coincidence. Sure, there were accidents, but meeting up with a guy three weeks after he'd fixed his car when Dean really had no destination beyond "somewhere else" was not accidental.

Apparently, Lindsey was playing guitar here, a talent that Dean hadn't seen in his fingers before, but he hadn't been looking either. When Lindsey chorded across a song, Dean thought of the way he'd held a pool cue, the way that he'd touched forefinger to thumb in a circle around the neck of a beer bottle.

Dean stayed for the show, which was why when he was there when the police had come in, talked about the waitress's husband being killed by an alligator. She asked, soft, "He was out on the bayous?"

And the police had to admit, no, he'd been at work in the back of the supermarket, so they were looking into foul play. The eyes of Alligators were like snake eyes, dark and dangerous, lacking something that Dean saw in dogs, even mean ones. On stage, Lindsey kept playing, hands flying, and Dean could see a faint scar across his wrist, pale, but there.

Grabbing his jacket, Dean got to work.

*****

The bar closed early because they'd let off the waitress to go identify the remains. When he'd looked up in the middle of his set, Dean hadn't been there anymore, and Lindsey wasn't sure he cared. Wasn't sure he didn't either, but whatever had made the married waitress a bad idea made Dean a worse one.

Home was a small apartment over a fishing shop outside of town. It was anonymous, distant from town if anything went wrong. Lindsey had no doubts that things would probably go wrong someday, maybe today, so he almost didn't stop when his headlights flashed over the bumper of a black Impala parked along the side of a road. He did, though, when he caught sight of a fire beyond the car.

Leaning back against the passenger side, Dean was watching a burning alligator and at first Lindsey thought it was alive until he recognized it as the monster alligator that hung in the local Alligator Tours office. At 12 feet, it was the largest one that had been caught locally and if Lindsey still worked at Wolfram and Hart he could have had everyone who had ever insisted on retelling the story in his presence killed. Repeatedly.

Dean looked up, and Lindsey noted the bloody scratch across his cheek, red staining his shirt from an injury hidden under his leather jacket.

The firelight was still burning, and Dean must have used up an entire bottle of lighter fluid to make it burn at all, tough reptile skin, thick and hard. Dean was nearly vibrating with repressed energy, jumping off of his car to bounce on his toes when he saw Lindsey and there was a story here, some explanation for a beaten up kid burning the local legend miles outside of town.

Lindsey had been in enough of those stories to know that sometimes there would never be an explanation that would explain it well, just a lie told to the rest of the world that covered the truth inadequately.

"Do you have a place to stay?" Lindsey said instead.

Suddenly, Dean was looking at Lindsey, really seeing him for the first time since Texas, and it didn't matter that it wasn't Angel and it wasn't Angel's car because it was _Dean_ , centuries younger than Angel but with the same look of predatory want. Lindsey stood, let Dean get too close, pushing for a fight, and the difference between this and any time that Lindsey had been pressed by Angel was the way that Dean smelled, copper like blood and the tang of live male sweat.

All of his violence he held inside like Angel, covering it with a smooth veneer of casual, a glossy shine of 'just like you' hiding the deep, divisive differences. Bloodied and sweaty, skin warm with the rush of fighting, Lindsey recognized that as much as it looked like the results of a bar room brawl from anywhere, as much as it smelled like it, it wasn't. It was the LA world in the breathing body of a man, held under the surface by scarred skin and tight willpower.

Lindsey kissed him.

*****

  
The guy from Texas, Lindsey -- and Dean should have known from the name that this was going to be weird -- kissed him, hard and dirty like girls only did if they wanted you so bad they were willing to go at it in the bathroom of a bar. Lindsey who appeared out of nowhere, and who was driving these roads late at night but psychos and dead people, was the one who leaned in and got that Dean wasn't done yet from the fight, needed more than a burning alligator.

Even Sammy hadn't understood that, the need to do more, skin on skin, alive, beating heart, the whole list of cliches that meant after killing things Dean needed to fuck.

It didn't matter that it was three weeks later and there was something still _off_ about Lindsey, what mattered was that he was physically there, someone Dean didn't trust farther than he could throw, didn't know more about than that he was good pool player, a good ass, and had lips that were hard, open against him. Lindsey was trying to control the kiss like he could absorb Dean's energy through this press of lips, but he'd need more than that to get to where Dean was. Not thinking, Dean pushed Lindsey back against the Impala, rough, waiting for resistance and finally getting it when Lindsey shoved back harder.

Lindsey pushed and then their bodies just fit suddenly, friction and counterpoint thrusts. When Lindsey yanked hard at the collar, Dean shrugged out of his jacket, let Lindsey push a hand all the way up the back of his shirt then drag his short nails down hard, strips of pain that spiked out and felt so much like fighting that Dean couldn't take it, leaned down and bit hard on Lindsey's neck.

Dean licked up a tendon, found a soft hollow of flesh beneath Lindsey's ear, behind the hard jaw bone and Dean bit again, wanting flesh, wanting intensity.

Lindsey bucked said, "fuck," hissing out the 'f,' making it nearly sibilant, and Dean had his lips against Lindsey's neck when he said it, felt the vibrations in his mouth, brain, cock. He wanted.

The jeans that Dean couldn't get his hand into were too tight against Lindsey so finally he just said, "Jeans" and Lindsey slid one hand down and popped the button open, slid the zipper down. Dean groaned, yanking at his own jeans, until there was just flesh and it was hysterical and right that neither one of them was wearing underwear.

Lindsey had his right hand around them both, flesh and heat and too tight and more tight, Dean pushed in, needing friction, wanting friction, wanting more. Lindsey leaned forward, head resting against Dean and the counterpoint rhythm was what got him, got them.

Dean felt the tightening, the coiling of anticipation and it was all of a sudden done. And he was coming and Lindsey was pushing more, so Dean tilted his head back and they were kissing again with tongue and teeth and this brutal need and want. Lindsey came hot into his hand.

*****

At home, Lindsey wasn't any less sure, was actually more sure, after seeing the way that Dean pulled himself back from that edge of being someone else. He let Dean shower away the scent of burned flesh, the harsh, choking stench of burned plaster.

Dean's car said: Want to go, want to run.

The scars on Dean's back said: He's going to hurt you and you'll love it.

Dean said, "Hey, do you have any shaving creme?"

Lindsey said, "I should leave the country."

*****

Louisiana hit Mississippi and he got a hold of his father, heard him say, "New York" and turned north as soon as he could.

There was good road going north and the south always felt damp, like the implication of sweat and work, even if he didn't do any. The ghosts were weirder, too, like the concentration of voodoo sent a freaky mating call out to them.

Dean was happy to move on, get away from the reptile eyes, cold blooded, soulless killers living in scaled skin. He drove.

*****

end  



End file.
